The Stormy has passed in New York. Daniels, née Clifford, finished up on the stand on Thursday, and she apparently did so with a flourish, engaging in some fireworks with defense counsel Susan Necheles. For her part, the witness seemed to edge toward accusing the defendant of having forced her into a sexual encounter, and Necheles tried to impugn Daniels’s credibility. From The Washington Post:

At one point, Necheles bluntly suggested that Daniels’s long career in adult films made her predisposed to make up things about sex—including her encounter with Trump. “You have a lot of experience making phony stories about sex appear to be real?” Necheles asked, suggesting that Daniels made up the details of her sexual encounter with Trump. “Wow,” Daniels said, then added: “If that story were untrue, I would have written it to be a lot better.”
Necheles pressed Daniels on her previous comments that she was so shaken when she saw Trump sitting in his hotel room in 2006 that she became lightheaded and almost fainted. “When you are not expecting a man twice your age in his underwear, absolutely,” Daniels said.

Hard to argue with that. Also very hard to lose the image in your head, either.

Another topic that fueled tension between the two was the slogan for Daniels’s 2018 tour of strip clubs: “Make America Horny Again.” Necheles argued that the slogan showed Daniels was glad to promote her connection to Trump. Daniels has said she hated the slogan and had never posted it herself, even if some promoters had. But on Thursday, Necheles presented two Instagram posts where Daniels used the slogan, and the witness conceded she had in fact posted it.

Defense wins the point here. Sort of like “Buy Trump Vodka,” “Buy Trump Steaks,” “Trump University—for Your Future,” and “Presidential Immunity.”

Daniels was followed onto the witness stand by a former Oval Office aide named Madeleine Westerhout, who lost no time in casting Donald and Melania as the parents from Little House with the Golden Commode on the Prairie.

Prosecutors asked witness Madeleine Westerhout—who was Trump’s assistant in the White House—about the former president’s relationship with his wife, Melania Trump. Westerhout described it as a “very special” marriage and said that they would laugh when Melania visited his office, and that the former president would communicate with her when he was running late. “He was my boss but she was the one in charge,” answered Westerhout.
A prosecutor asked Madeleine Westerhout whether she was nervous to testify, and Westerhout replied: “I am now.” Donald Trump smiled.
The current witness is going through a list of Donald Trump’s contacts that he requested be transferred from the Trump Organization to his White House list in 2017. That list included American Media Inc. CEO David Pecker, a key witness in this case, along with names such as Bill O’Reilly, Serena Williams and Jeanine Pirro.

Poor Serena Williams, getting her name tossed into that landfill.

Elsewhere, the knives came out for Judge Arthur Engoron, who smacked El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago for $454 million in his civil trial back in February. From NBC New York:

A high-profile New York real estate lawyer, whose law license was once suspended, said he approached the judge presiding over Donald Trump’s civil fraud case to offer unsolicited advice about a law at issue in the case. Attorney Adam Leitman Bailey made the claim during an interview with NBC New York, saying he spoke to Judge Arthur Engoron three weeks prior to the judge’s February decision to fine the former president $454 million for falsely inflating the value of his assets. The judge, through a court spokesman, denied impropriety and said he was “wholly uninfluenced” by Mr. Bailey. New York’s judicial oversight body has now launched an investigation into the alleged interaction, according to sources familiar with the matter.

If the phrase “high-profile New York real estate lawyer” doesn’t set off a carillon of alarm bells in your head, you haven’t been paying attention over the past decade. It looks like it may be all hands on deck now. Time to delegitimize verdicts you’ve already lost.

Bailey, who said he is no fan of Trump, was not involved in the civil case and is not connected to any of the four separate criminal cases against the former president. He said he knows the judge from having appeared before him as a litigant “hundreds of times.” Bailey said he “explained to him” that a fraud statute at issue in the case was not intended to be used to shut down a major company, especially in a case without clear victims. He said such a ruling would hurt New York’s economy. Engoron had rejected a similar argument raised by the Trump team in court. “He had a lot of questions, you know, about certain cases. We went over it,” Bailey said.

Destroying the village in order to save the idiot.

Headshot of Charles P. Pierce
Charles P. Pierce

Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976. He lives near Boston and has three children.